I talk about things in my life as if they were universal to human nature.

Category Archives: Whatever

I can use it as sort of a springboard to post little snippets of things I’d like to write more about elsewhere, and also I can use it to post the stuff that I write about the past (stuff in the vein of how I feel about E and so on). So expect interesting histories soon, maybe a collection of Irish antics.

I was recently under the weather a bit, so I thought I’d talk about the time that I was really sick.

It was my 2nd year here, and I’d gotten the damn flu. When I just get colds, I take some tylenol and go to class, it’s not too bad usually. The upside of going to class when you’re sick is that you can get the other people in the class sick, forcing them to possibly miss lectures and do slightly worse on the exam, which is misanthropic thinking but you can’t arrest me for thoughtcrime.

So, I’m feeling pretty rubbish on Tuesday, but I still go to class. Whatever. I’m thinking that maybe I have a cold and I’ll get over it.

On Wednesday, I wake up, and it’s horrible. It wasn’t like I was really sniffly or choughing, the obvious symptoms of minor disease. I’m running a moderate fever, and I have chills, muscle weakness, and a headache. But still, I go to class. My bio lecture in the morning. I looked ostensibly normal, but walking up the hill to campus, it felt like my lungs were on fire and I was about to collapse. But I made it and sat for the lecture, and walked back home. Then I got back into bed and took a nap until lunch. I got up, ate lunch, and went back to sleep. I had physics lecture and a stat discussion in the afternoon. I must have gone to them both, because I never miss class, but I don’t remember going to the physics lecture because I was pretty fucked up by then, I guess. I do remember going to stat discussion though, and I was just sprawled out at my desk, I remember staring at the clock for a while, but I was seriously mentally gone (although I’d have to admit that I was mentally gone for most of stat. I hate stat.)

When I came back, I crawled back into bed again. Then dinner. I’d pretty much spent the entire day in bed. I remember asking my roommate if he could wake up early to deliver my stat homework if I were too dead to go to class tomorrow. I’d figured that if I got even just a bit worse, there’d be no way that I could go to class. Maybe I’d just drop off my homework and come back. Anyway, back to bed. I’d been sleeping well, which is weird but I guess the illness just helps you sleep.

The next morning (Thursday), I woke up (which is good. I didn’t die in my sleep.) The first thought that run through my head amount to, “Ok, I’m awake. Am I alright? Yeah, oh, everything feels better. Yeah, I can work with this.” So I get up and go to my usual classes. It feels a bit like a mild cold, which is paradise compared to what an angry flu feels like. I had classes until noon, so I didn’t come back until then. Meanwhile, my roommates had awakened and wondered to each other whether or not I had died. We had a good laugh about it when I came back.

Pretty good, in general. I recently found her on Facebook. We had eighth grade together. The school was full of hood rats — the impressionable young people who listen to rap and then adapt their lives to the words of their heroes — at best, the world’s future construction workers and at worst, defendants in future criminal proceedings. So, when you go to a school like that, you invariably disavow the traditional definition of “clique” and befriend anyone who isn’t human scum. So, I didn’t go for the traditional nerd group (which consisted solely of me and two others) but I was friends with skaters, artsy kids, and E, who was a goth.

Every day she wore dark colors (while being pale) and it looked more or less like she shopped for clothes exclusively at Hot Topic. This was back when Hot Topic wasn’t universally reviled. So we were relatively good friends, but it’s not like we’d hang out all the time.

Anyway, I told Alt. that I added E. He was like, “Oh! She was the one girl you could talk to without freaking out.”

I wrote on my palm, “Be yourself.” Previously, I had on occasion compared myself to others. What would he or she do in this situation? I decided that none of this hypothetical context mattered, and none of it really mattered. Does it really matter that me, and the Russian guy, and the libertarian blonde chick are all using black Pilot V5 pens? Does that say something about who we are? Are we then more similar to each other than to people who use trashy Uniball pens?

I decided no. That’s when I marked up my palm. Be yourself. Do things that you want to do, and ignore what others are doing. But I find it hard.

Today I got a small essay back from the GSI. Not that great grade-wise although I had put a lot of work into it, so I thought about who she was and what she was reading for. I thought about my stylistic tendencies. The essay comprised of discrete questions to be answered, and that I did not present my answers using the same terms of the prompt, I feel, is a stylistic choice. Ever since I finished The Elements of Style I feel that I’ve been reading everything for style. When I see the construction, “there is” or “there are” my mind immediately goes BZZZZT WRONG.

So, two things have either happened. The hubristic part of me feels that my information is all there, but just packaged into a format that was alien to the GSI, but the meek part of me feels that something is truly missing from my essay that I can’t see. I guess I could go to her office hours and ask her, but I don’t want to be one of those people who complains about his grades.